Here he is, Mr. Asian America: The Mr. Hyphen contest has become the
magazine's signature fund-raiser -- an offbeat way of talking about a serious
topic, while giving back to the community at large. Photo courtesy of Hyphen magazine

Hyphen, the Bay Area magazine of Asian American arts, culture, and commentary, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a passing of the torch, as founder Melissa Hung hands the editorial reins to veteran staffer Harry Mok. Jeff Yang talks to both about why Asian America still needs a magazine

I have to start this column off with a prologue, because this one is personal and a little bittersweet. While you're reading, keep this thought in the back of your mind: Every time a chapter ends, another one begins. It's a good saying -- realistic, but hopeful. So here goes:

In February 2002, a skeleton staff -- all that remained of an ambitious attempt to take a small but scrappy independent publication into the overcarbonated world of venture capital and dot-com dreams -- bid a final farewell to their beloved magazine, and then to one another. AMagazine: Inside Asian America wasn't the first magazine that sought to trace the fractal outline of the nation's fastest-growing community, but it had grown into the largest, had lasted the longest, and in its time, it did some pretty cool things.

I was there for most of it. I, along with three friends, founded aMag the summer after we graduated from college, back in 1989. I remember how we threw our belongings in a U-Haul, trekked down the East Coast from Boston to Brooklyn and lived together in a rented townhouse: Two guys, two girls, a cat, and a dream -- and a bunch of maxed-out credit cards. We recruited a staff, pulling together an ever-expanding masthead of volunteers; we raised money by throwing fund-raising parties, cobbling together our publishing budget one club kid at a time.

And then -- five years after we debuted as an all-volunteer quarterly -- we decided that it was time to see if the mag we'd bled and sweated for could stand on its own. We took out a bank loan, raised money from friends and family, and relaunched with a paid staff, a real office, and a plan to make money doing what we loved doing anyway. Five long, tough years after that, the magazine seemed on the cusp of turning a corner. But instead of turning that corner, we took a running leap into the glittery unknown, making a deal with the dot-com devil that led to a year of absurdity -- launch parties, acquisitions, stock options, glaze-eyed excess -- and ultimately, a free-fall into oblivion that ended with aMagazine gone forever.

Or maybe not -- at least in spirit.

I mentioned that I was there for most of aMagazine's exciting, exhausting life. I wasn't there for its death, having resigned in protest after a bid I'd organized to buy back the mag was voted down by the company's board. After that, I'd retreated for a while from things Asian American or magazine-related, and particularly things that combined the two.

Which meant that I wasn't around to hear how, shortly afterwards, a group of Bay Area writers and editors -- many of them former aMagazine contributors, interns, and staffers -- started meeting to discuss the void left behind by aMag's disappearance. Or that, out of that cluster of like-minded souls, artists, activists, journalists, a West Coast mirror image of aMagazine's original volunteer army, a new publication had arisen, calling itself Hyphen.

Every time a chapter ends, another one begins.

Passing On, Passing Through

"It was 2002, the year aMagazine folded," remembers Hyphen founding editor Melissa Hung. "A group of people got together in here in the Bay Area and we started talking about what an Asian American mag would look like if we were running it. At first it was a joke, but then some of us started taking it seriously. I mean, about half of us had passed through aMagazine at one point or another -- I actually interviewed for a job with you guys. So I guess you could say it's your fault, dammit!" She laughs.

I'm meeting with Melissa and Hyphen senior editor Harry Mok at Parea, a wine and tapas bar on Valencia in the Mission. I've been wanting to write about Hyphen for years -- five of them, in fact -- but never had the right forum or found the right time. Now, as the publication crosses the half-decade mark, reaching the same age aMag did when it evolved from a part-time guerrilla effort into a business, the time seems right, especially given the interesting parallels between the two; the sense of history repeating itself, but with lessons learned, and some different decisions made in the process.

"I remember we held our first meetings sitting around the kitchen of one of our apartments," says Hung. "And the meetings just started to grow -- more and more people would come, and soon the kitchen wouldn't hold everyone anymore. We saw there was so much interest that we said to ourselves, 'Well, let's at least put out an issue and see what happens.'"

In December 2002, the fledgling effort held its first fundraiser, which brought in a few thousand dollars; not enough to start a magazine, but at least enough to throw a few more fund-raisers. In the meantime, progress toward a premiere issue was proceeding, built around a mission statement remarkable both for its coherence and its defiance.

"Hyphen is a magazine about Asian America for the culturally and politically savvy," it reads in part. "Like its readers, Hyphen is many things -- cool librarian, shy musician, dorky hipster, cute techie. Like Asian America, its interests are varied -- politics, art, health, music. Much like the hyphen connects words and concepts, Hyphen magazine connects readers with Asian America as it happens. Why Hyphen? Because we'll yawn if we see another interview with the same three Asians the mainstream approves of ... Because when we scanned the newsstand, we couldn't find ourselves. Now we can."

Coherent, because Hung and her cofounders had made the smart decision to put stakes in the ground around Hyphen's turf. It would be an Asian American magazine, but wouldn't try to speak to, for or about all Asian Americans. "The idea was to cover social justice issues, but to be stealth about it, not hit people over the head. We wanted to find fun and quirky ways to talk about serious topics," says Hung. "And of course we also wanted to talk about arts and culture, things and people that weren't being covered in mainstream magazines -- emerging artists, not just whoever is in People's 'Most Beautiful People' list this year."

Defiant, too -- defiantly Asian American, but also defiantly not Asian American, at least not in the way that mainstream media and even traditional ethnic media have defined the term and the community. "We wanted to talk about things that are not obviously Asian American," she says. "A story that isn't Asian American on its face, but that has a hidden Asian American angle -- that really appeals to us. For instance, we did an issue about food, but not in the way that people would think. Asians get so stereotyped by our food, so instead, we decided to talk about the agricultural component: The people behind food, who are making it from the ground up."

In fact, one of the centerpieces of that issue, Hyphen's second, was written by Harry Mok, talking about his experiences growing up as the son of a farmer. "I grew up on a Chinese vegetable farm, in Woodland, outside of Sacramento," says Mok. "It still exists to this day -- my brother runs it. But that's an Asian American experience no one ever thinks about. People go to Chinatown, see vegetables in stores, and they don't really think about where they come from."

"I promise you," says Hung, "We're never going to run a recipe in Hyphen."

Passing the hat

What allows Hyphen to defy convention, to throw curves at the corners rather than meatballs down the middle, is the decision Hung and the magazine's charter staff made to launch Hyphen as a nonprofit -- "as opposed to a nonprofitable," she says. "We figured independent magazines weren't a money-making venture anyway, and it would give us access to other kinds of funding, like grants and donations. And it also said something about us, that we were there to serve the community, not to make money off of it."

But it also locked the magazine's volunteer staff into a cycle -- print a magazine, raise money, rinse and repeat. "After that first issue, which cost $6,000 to publish, we realized, OK, yeah, we're not making a magazine, we're building a factory to churn out magazines, and we have to keep churning out another one, and another, and another," says Hung. "And we have to raise money to publish each one."

Hyphen pulled together a business staff, which focused primarily on fund-raising -- planning and throwing parties, dinners, trivia nights, concerts, speed-dating sessions, even the annual "Mr. Hyphen" pageant -- to keep the cash IV dripping, so the presses could continue to roll every four months. ("We originally intended to be quarterly," says Mok. "But it became pretty obvious that we couldn't do more than three issues a year without killing ourselves.")

The melding of business types into Hyphen's idealistic team provided some early strains in the collective. "The founders of the mag were mostly journalists and nonprofit staffers," says Hung. "We realized we needed help on the business side, but it was hard for us to work with people from that kind of a background -- we just don't speak the same language. It's led to clashes sometimes."

Conflict is inevitable in any organization, but in an all-volunteer, virtual institution, negative energy tends to reverberate. "Someone really should have made a reality TV show of us when we were first starting," says Hung. "So much drama. So many long e-mails. People would send out these huge e-mails, and five minutes later, someone else would respond with an even huger e-mail, detailing their philosophical differences. The early days were filled with really heated discussions that ended with people storming out -- virtually, anyway."

Now the edit and business teams meet separately, every other week. "And the people who are on both teams attend both meetings," says Hung, which means double the time and commitment. Multiply that by a "zillion little things," and you'll come up with Hung's own role, which includes not just providing editorial direction, but cutting checks and managing the bank account. It's been stressful, as one might guess. "I was experiencing this general fatigue, asking myself, 'Why am I so tired all the time?'" she says, "And I realized, this is taking up so much of my energy -- in some ways, I'm burnt out."

Passing the torch

That's why, this past June, Hung threw a special birthday party for herself and for Hyphen -- her 30th, Hyphen's fifth. "I thought my birthday would coincide nicely with telling people I intended to step down," she says. "So I held a 'Goodbye Hyphen, Hello 30' party. But I'd been thinking about it for almost a year. I felt like I'd contributed everything I could at this point, and I thought staying on just wasn't the best thing for the organization. And I wanted to be a little selfish -- this has been such a huge part of my personal life."

While Hyphen began as a collective vision, Hung has been its driving force. "So immediately, there was this sense of dread," says Mok. "The magazine wouldn't have been around without her, so we were worried. We were uncertain how things would go."

But Hung had been methodically passing her duties to others one by one in the previous year, disengaging from the organization at the pace of continental drift so as not to startle the team. "I just told everyone, 'Look, you don't need me anymore, you guys are already doing everything that I used to do," says Hung. "Well, everything except for actually editing the magazine."

And so: Every time a chapter ends, another one begins. The staff mulled over who would take over as editor-in-chief. It had to be someone committed to Hyphen's no-to-recipes, yes-to-resistance editorial ideals. It had to be a veteran -- "the problem with being a volunteer organization is that you have a lot of turnover," admits Hung. "We wanted someone who'd been around for a while, for continuity. Someone who had real journalistic experience. And one more thing -- we needed someone incredibly sexy."

Mok laughs: "So of course, the choice was obvious." Though now listed on the masthead as "interim" editor-in-chief, Mok -- steady, soft-spoken, and imperturbable -- was the acclamation selection of the staff, and is ready to take on the reins and responsibility. His biggest goal is a simple one: "I hope I can help us streamline production so we can eventually become the quarterly magazine we've always wanted to be," he says. "Same vision -- just four issues instead of three."

Passing of an era?

But increasing frequency also means adding a third to the nonprofit publication's budget. "That's another challenge, obviously," says Mok. "We need to find a way to be sustainable so we can survive. You can't run on volunteer manpower forever, no matter how passionate you are."

Hung notes that of their main sources of revenue -- events, donations, and subscriptions (plus "a tiny bit of advertising -- a teeny, tiny bit") -- only the third is easy to scale. "We're really a reader-supported medium, much like public radio, and we're trying to educate our readership on that. Why is it important to subscribe? Why do our subscriptions cost more than Cosmo? It's a challenge, because people these days expect content to be free and to be online."

That's something that even mainstream print media is dealing with, as Mok, a veteran newspaper guy, readily notes: "We're an embattled industry." Given that nearly 90 percent of Asian Americans are online, particularly those in Hyphen's core market of educated, progressive 18- to 34-year-olds, does killing trees still make sense?

It's a question that Hung and Mok have both thought long and hard about. "I don't have data I can show you that there's a viable market for an Asian American magazine," admits Hung. "Indie mags have been dying left and right. But there's something real about a physical, tangible magazine. It has weight. It has permanence. You can take it onto public transportation. You can take it into the bathroom ..."

Mok interrupts: "If you're really into gadgets, you bring a laptop in there."

Hung makes a face. "There's both a sexiness and a substance to a magazine that digital media doesn't have, that people respond to. It's like, 'We've arrived, we have our own magazine' -- even if it's just a little magazine like Hyphen. People want to know how they can get it, and how they can get in it."

That's a point that Mok concedes. "A magazine is a symbol. It means that there's something out there for you, and that there are other people interested in the issues that relate to you. Everyone's trying to figure out how media's going to move to the Internet, but I don't think printed versions of anything are going to go away completely. They're going to evolve, not disappear."

But a magazine can be a "symbol" with just, say, 5,000 readers. To be a medium, it needs a mass audience and broad circulation -- two things that I can say from firsthand experience are the hardest things for any publication to obtain. Getting large numbers of readers and making sure you're available everywhere requires costs and sacrifices that just don't make sense for a niche periodical. "Circulation is hard. To reach people who buy magazines from the big bookstores, you have to up your print run, sign these heinous contracts -- you're just bleeding money," says Hung. "I'd love to be able to walk into a Borders in Indiana and see us on the shelf, but I just think that would be a bad idea financially."

The fact is, more people are probably already engaged with Hyphen via its Web presence than its print edition. And that's not a bad thing at all. The print magazine defines the brand, establishes its identity, gives it a center of gravity -- it isn't going away. But the Hyphen Blog has evolved into something rich, spontaneous, and eminently readable -- a first place to turn for a filter on Asian American news and culture. And it's the blog that Mok hopes to invest more volunteer time and energy around. "I'd really like to increase our presence on the Web," he says. "We're already revamping our website to make it a better reader experience. We're going to do more web-exclusive stuff. And there's been an influx of new, younger members to our staff, who have skills with really interesting emerging technologies. I think we can take advantage of those new ways to tell stories."

The challenges faced by Hyphen are those faced by traditional media in macrocosm, but Hyphen's small size and passionate staff give it an advantage over the lumbering dinosaurs of the mainstream. They have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. The most interesting and dynamic media experiments out there are already looking a lot like Hyphen -- user-generated, "volunteer" news organizations like Korea's OhMyNews; crowd-sourced, collective editing systems, like Web 2.0 darling Digg.com; even nonprofit print publications, like the St. Petersburg Times.

After aMagazine's passing, I was frequently asked what I thought about the future of Asian American magazines, and about which, if any, represented the hope of the next generation. I always answered with vague but positive generalisms, not wishing to make bets or play favorites. But as difficult as the road has been -- and will continue to be -- for Hyphen's intrepid team, I look at what they're doing, and think it's what we at aMagazine would have done, if we'd made some different choices -- choices that could have kept us alive and publishing today.

But of course, if that had happened, there might never have been a Hyphen, and that would be a shame, because it's the smartest, most interesting, and most important thing to happen in Asian American media since -- well, since 1989, at the very least.

Every time a chapter ends, another one begins. Happy birthday, Hyphen, godspeed, and congratulations.

PopMail

You'll notice that it's been a whole month since the last edition of this column, and that's because with the summer fading fast, both I and my incredibly patient editor Amy Moon decided to take a vacation -- a real one for a change, meaning, no deadlines and no bugging me about deadlines. Post Labor Day, we'll be back to the usual grind at the Asian Pop factory -- churning out a column every two weeks. If publishing four issues a year has been a challenge for the Hyphenators, putting out a bimonthly column has felt like a Sisyphean task, but it's also been the most rewarding thing I've done since -- well, since 1989, at the very least.

I've particularly enjoyed alternating between writing about Asian pop and Asian American culture -- because it's enabled me to cover most of my life's obsessions in one fell swoop. But this switching of polarities has proved disconcerting to some readers, and I thought it was worth discussing, now that I've been Asian Pop's sole voice for just over two years. The notion of writing about "Asian" pop culture (as if a vast swath of geography were somehow collapsible under a single conceptual umbrella) rarely seems to provoke controversy. But the notion of writing about Asian Americans, this diverse, multiethnic population, as if it stands on some kind of common ground and has some kind of shared identity -- well, that still raises hackles.

Here are a couple of typical reader critiques of that notion:

"Multiculturalism has us constantly looking for things that separate us, make us special, when in fact there are way more things we all have in common," writes one reader, a white male.

"I would challenge the notion that there is a monolithic Asian community (indeed, many Asian communities are deeply hostile to each other, i.e. the Japanese and Korean)," writes a female reader, whose race is identified. "Why do so many Asian-American identified writers, from self-proclaimed Asian supremacist Kenneth Eng on down, labor under the notion that their ethnicity permeates every fiber of their being, that it somehow impart some special, essential quality to everything they do?"

I'm not sure why, but the notion of Asian Americans as a community -- yes, a varied, intrinsically diverse one, but nevertheless, a body with collective history and interests -- is itself a hot-button issue to some people, both within and outside of its fuzzy boundaries. It's a topic that has long interested me -- what makes up the notion of Asian America, whether it does, in fact, exist, and why it's so frightening or offensive to consider that it might. And I'd like your thoughts on this topic, readers -- for a future column. What does Asian America mean? How does it fit within, between, around your sense of identity? Is it here to stay, or going away, and why? What are its limits, and what are its horizons? Drop me an e-mail at asianpopculture@gmail.com and let me know your thoughts.

To start things off, I'd like to propose that Asian America exists right here, not in this column, but in the dialogue provoked and fostered by this column, and by publications like Hyphen. By discussing it, we give it shape, a shape that's constantly evolving, organic, like our community itself.

With that, I want to urge you to help keep that conversation going: Subscribe to Hyphen, if you haven't already. At $18 for four issues, it's a worthwhile investment in a worthy cause.